Friday, 7th November 2008

The Catcher in the Rye

After the horror of Simon’s Island, I was grateful for pretty much ANYTHING, but The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger was good in its own right. It felt at times like I was just reading a very long monologue from A View from the Bridge because of the way Holden speaks, but it was very easy to read, just a whole book of stream of consciousness, really. As Daniel, Iain and various other people said, nothing happens, but I quite enjoy that. My brain’s very tired these days and it’s nice to have a book which is literally just like thinking, but reading the thoughts written down. For Holden, there isn’t much deep thought or meaningfulness to the words he speaks, but if your mind feels like it, you can easily find some. You find yourself wondering whether or not Holden is a good guy. On the one hand, he hates everybody and sees them as ‘phonies’, therefore automatically considering himself above other people, he has dropped out of three schools simply because he doesn’t see why he should try, he has a problem with authority, with simple hard work and with compliance… On the other hand, he has values that most kids his age probably wouldn’t consider: he finds it atrocious that the F word is scrawled all over the walls of his old primary school, and he dispproves of the way his room-mate is very keen on one night stands and screwing anything which comes near him. He is very fond of his little sister Phoebe and tries to look out for her, he is still very fond of his dead older brother Allie, and misses him a lot.

I think the eventual conclusion you come to is that Holden is neither a bad guy nor a good guy. He’s just a normal guy, and this is the brilliant simplicity of The Catcher in the Rye. Holden does not seem to have grown as a character by the end of the book, and there have been no major developments in plot; this seems to reflect Holden’s attitude to life, which I think goes roughly along the lines of “Well that’s goddamn life”. Definitely worth a read; whether you are patient enough to come back for a second read depends on the individual.